Scarlet characters

Appears from the start

An eighteen-year-old farmer from Rieux in southern France, who runs her grandmother's produce farm and flies the deliveries into Toulouse herself in a battered old ship. Blunt, quick-tempered and fiercely loyal, she has spent two weeks fighting the police, who have written off her grandmother's disappearance as a woman walking out on her life rather than an abduction. She wears a red hooded sweatshirt, waits tables at the village tavern when money is short, and carries her grandmother's gun.

Appears from the start

Scarlet's grandmother and the woman who raised her, a retired military pilot who ran the farm outside Rieux alone for decades. She vanished two weeks before the book opens without a message, a packed bag or any sign of struggle the police will accept. Scarlet is certain she was taken, and equally certain her grandmother was hiding something for most of her life.

First appears in chapter 2

A waitress at the Rieux tavern and a friend of Scarlet's, cheerfully fascinated by the newcomer fighting in the tavern's back room.

Also known as Ze'ev Kesley

First appears in chapter 3

A street fighter who turned up in Rieux a few weeks ago and wins in the tavern's back room without apparent effort. Tall and heavily built, with unruly hair, green eyes and a tattoo of letters and numbers on his forearm, he is unnervingly fast in the ring and awkward and quiet outside it. He pays more attention to Scarlet's missing grandmother than a drifter passing through a village has any reason to.

First appears in chapter 3

The cyborg mechanic from New Beijing, now the most wanted fugitive on Earth, sitting in a prison cell awaiting delivery to Luna. She knows at last what she is, Lunar and the missing Princess Selene, and wears the improved cyborg hand and foot Dr. Erland left her, but she has no plan beyond getting out of the building.

First appears in chapter 4

An American cadet turned thief held in the same New Beijing prison as Cinder, jailed for stealing a military spaceship. Talkative, vain and relentlessly pleased with himself, he offers Cinder a way off the planet on the grounds that the stolen ship is still exactly where he left it.

First appears in chapter 5

The newly crowned emperor of the Eastern Commonwealth, negotiating with Queen Levana while the plague spreads and his own people demand the escaped cyborg be recaptured. Publicly he is the ruler who was deceived by a Lunar fugitive; privately he cannot decide what he believes about her.

First appears in chapter 5

The queen of Luna, waiting on the moon for the marriage that will make her empress of the Eastern Commonwealth, and using the promise of the plague antidote to force the pace. She wants the escaped cyborg returned above everything else, and will not say why.

First appears in chapter 6

The palace scientist who told Cinder what she is and then vanished from New Beijing, leaving her an address in Africa and instructions to find him there. He is absent for most of the book, but everything Cinder does is aimed at eventually reaching him.

First appears in chapter 9

Scarlet's estranged father, who drank his way out of her childhood and reappears at the farmhouse burned and badly frightened. He was seized by the same men who took Michelle, held while they tried to get information out of him that he did not have, and let go.

First appears in chapter 24

Levana's head thaumaturge, running the queen's operations on Earth from the pack's base in Paris. Composed and unhurried, she treats Earthens and her own subordinates alike as instruments, and what she wants is everything Michelle Benoit knows.

First appears in chapter 30

One of the Lunar operatives quartered in Paris, and Wolf's younger brother. Taken as a child in the same conscription, he has spent years trying to prove himself to their handlers and resents everything about the brother who left.

First appears in chapter 44

Cinder's dismantled android friend, reduced to a personality chip that Cinder carried out of New Beijing in her pocket. Aboard the stolen ship she is given somewhere to live again, and immediately has opinions about it.